Lexington

A nation of volunteers

IN HIS 1961 speech to Congress, John Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon in ten years, even though most space scientists had no idea how to. In a similar spirit, George Bush, in his 2002 state-of-the-union speech, suddenly called on all Americans to give two years of their lives to voluntary national service, and announced a new bureaucracy to help them do it.

This came out of the blue. Does the president really want America to have some sort of national service? And if he does, what should one think about it?

Actually, America has a pilot version of national service already. It is called Americorps, and was Bill Clinton's pet project. Around 50,000 young Americorps volunteers serve full-time in charities. The programme pays them a small stipend for living costs, and at the end of their time they get $4,725 a year towards university expenses. Mr Bush wants to turn Americorps into more than a pilot scheme by adding 25,000 volunteers and boosting its budget by 50%.

Compared with the 110m Americans who volunteer for a few hours a week, this is still tiny. But there are other pieces to the jigsaw. In the “Work Study” scheme, poor students can pick up extra cash by taking part-time jobs at college. At present, almost all the jobs are in the universities themselves; Mr Bush would require half of all work-study funds to go on community-service jobs. This is a bigger deal. Since 1m students are in the programme, Mr Bush's plan would increase the number of social-service volunteers by 250,000. At the other end of the age-scale, he wants to inveigle twice that number of retired people back into teaching by promising that anyone who tutors a child for 500 hours can earn a college scholarship for a grandchild.

The president's plan conflates two separate ideas. One is national service—full-time volunteer work, usually done by 18-25-year-olds and organised by federal bureaucracies. Americorps is a national-service idea. The other is private volunteerism, usually undertaken for a few hours a week, at any point in your life, and through local bodies such as churches. Work Study, “Senior Corps” (the teaching programme) and the target of two years' service are all features of volunteerism, not national service.

Partly because of this intellectual muddle, supporters of “real” national service prefer a competing proposal. A Democrat, Evan Bayh, has teamed up with a Republican, John McCain, to propose a bill in the Senate that would not mess around boosting Americorps by a mere 50%: they would quintuple it by 2010. Unlike Mr Bush, they also include a military component. In exchange for $18,000 in cash or a scholarship, recruits could serve 18 months in the armed forces (much shorter than the current term of service), followed by a spell in the reserves. The idea is to bridge the gap between civilian and military elites by making it easier to move between university and the armed forces.

The merits of the rival plans are finely balanced. The president's would encourage a wider range of volunteers by including retired people (to be fair, the Bayh/McCain bill also expands “Senior Corps”). On the other hand, it would be a bits-and-pieces affair, with volunteers signing up in short bursts, locally. The senators' plan would probably produce a more reliable supply of volunteers in the places America needs them most, the inner cities. Either way, both proposals have a lot going for them.

But before debate can be joined, supporters of both ideas face more fundamental objections. Critics argue that even the weaker Bush plan would undermine voluntary service by “federalising volunteerism”—ie, imposing a new government bureaucracy on it. And they fear it could harm civil society itself (the network of local institutions where most voluntary activity takes place) by making the government the main link between individuals and the society they offer to help. Dick Armey, the number-two Republican in Congress, has called the whole idea “obnoxious”.

Such views are rooted in basic political beliefs and there is not much arguing with them. Defenders of national service can only respond in kind. Will Marshall, a “New Democrat” and one of the first proponents of national service, claims that the idea has the virtue of avoiding the pitfalls of left and right. It encourages lots of bottom-up community work, without the sense of entitlement and dependency that is the besetting fault of the left. But because voluntary work would be encouraged and organised by the government, it avoids the let-them-eat-cake indifference that can be the besetting sin of the right. National service is, in short, the quintessential “third-way” programme. Whether that is a recommendation or not depends on your point of view.

Still others claim national service is needed because civic involvement in America is in long-term decline (as evidence, they cite falling voter turnout and Robert Putnam's argument that Americans are joining community organisations less than they used to). It seems unlikely that national service will encourage people to vote. But defenders of the idea are on firm ground when they say that the practical objections to national service are wrong. This may prove to be the clinching argument.

Far from undermining the voluntary sector, greater federal involvement seems to encourage it. That, at least, is what has happened with Americorps. The organisation's rule of thumb is that each of its volunteers should produce three extra volunteers in the charitable organisations they work with, since the biggest single encouragement to volunteerism is getting to hear about a programme that works.

Mr Bush's call will help spread the word. But local word of mouth is what really matters. National service, if it is to take off, will have to persuade millions of local voluntary bodies to co-operate with federal bureaucracies. Kennedy's summons to space only needed to jolt a few thousand scientists into doing something they did not know they could do. Mr Bush's call is less spectacular, but even more ambitious.